Wolfram|Alpha Pro: Launching a Democratization of Data Science

At Software Studies Initiative, we have been working to democratize the use of digital image processing for exploring large image and video collections.

In September 20111, we released ImagePlot - a set of free open-source software tools which we developed in the lab and used in all our own research projects. You can now take a set of images and videos, automatically extract basic visual feature and then explore the patterns in your image or video collection using the extracted data.

So we are very exited to read the latest post from founder of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha Stephen Wolfram about the this week release of Wolfram|Alpha Pro, and how it automates analysis and visualization of the data sets.

Last October I was fortunate to chat with Stephen over lunch at Wolfram Data Summmit 2011 conference. He was interested in our work on analyzing and visualizing the spaces of variations of cultural artifacts. We talked about how the models of biological evolution and variability may related to cultural evolution and also the principles described in Wolfram's famous book The New Kind of Science.

Here are a few examples of our visualizations of spaces of variation in different kinds of cultural artifacts: